31 May 2023
5pm – 7pm
Moa Carlsson with respondent Otto Saumarez Smith
Coal, as a main source of fuel and energy, was central to the development of modern Britain. A lot has been written about the British coal industry, about collieries, mining communities and how coal transformed cities, the national economy and everyday lives. What is less well known is what impact the waste produced during coal mining has had on the national landscape. Between 1913 and 1983, according to records from the National Coal Board (NCB), more than fourteen billion metric tons of coal were mined in the United Kingdom. But for every ton brought to the surface, the waste output was almost a third of that. This paper addresses what happened to the more than six billion tons of colliery waste, also known as coal spoil, generated during that same period.
Coal spoil was piled into huge conical heaps, sometimes reaching a height of forty-five metres. Colliery waste was also spread out across agricultural areas (“lost” in NCB’s parlance) to be absorbed into fields and grazing areas over time. Used as aggregate, coal spoil was also stashed away in large engineering works such as new motorways, bridges, power stations and railways. From Aberfan to the “Wigan Alps”, this paper will discuss some key strategies deployed by the NCB for disposing of this waste. Concentrated in particular regions and towns, these efforts left marks across the national landscape that can be traced over time in aerial photographs.
The research on the architectural, environmental and social history of coal spoil is drawn from the book project Scenic Calculations: Landscape, Industry and Planning in Twentieth-Century Britain, which traces how the national landscape was transformed with the expansion of the coal, electricity and oil industries. This paper argues that the activities of disposing of coal spoil amount to a distinct urbanism of increasing environmental, social and economic importance. Due to climate change, many historic coal spoil deposits, notably in South Wales, are today posing growing and significant threats to their local communities. Intense rainfall, for example, increases the risk of landslides of spoil tips that are located on sloping ground, which is what happened in Aberfan in 1966. Coal waste is thus a growing issue for planners, and this paper seeks to chart the largely overlooked history of this abundant resource’s effects on the geography of Great Britain.
– Now to properly welcome you to what is the third research seminar of 2023, which is co-organized by with Rixt Woudstra, who you will hear from shortly. We chose architecture as a theme of the series, really as a way to think about the porous boundaries between the arts and the landscapes
And spaces that we inhabit. So we’re calling it “Summer of Architecture 2023”. So the series, as you know, showcases new research and approaches to architecture and its histories, but the hope really is to create conversations that allow us to think expansively, both about art and about architecture.
We’ll cover a range of different topics over the next few sessions. We’ve had a few sessions already, so I encourage you to look at the programme, come back. All events are posted online as well for viewing and note-taking later. So without further ado, Rixt. – Thank you, Sria.
So it is a pleasure to welcome everyone here for the third event of the architecture summer series. As Sria said, there are five lectures in which we aim to highlight new and, also, interdisciplinary research and scholarship in British architectural history in the broadest sense. Last week we heard from Professor Jiat-Hwee Chang
About climate change, air conditioning and architecture in Singapore. This week we’ll continue with a subject that’s slightly closer to home, but no less interdisciplinary. Today’s lecture, which is titled “Landscapes of Waste”, explores how Britain’s landscapes were transformed through the expansion of the coal industry in the 20th century.
And our speaker today, Moa Carlsson, will discuss how the enormous amount of waste produced during coal mining in the past decades has left its marks on the national landscape. I think you mentioned it was about 6 billion tonnes. Which is something that can be seen and studied through aerial photography
As she will show us tonight. And I’ve also mentioned, or I have to mention here, that this is part of a broader book project which is titled “Scenic Calculations: Landscape, Industry and Planning in 20th Century Britain”, which explores how Britain’s landscapes were altered through the coal industry,
But also through electricity and oil industries. It’s just under contract, Moa said. So I hope it will come out soon because it sounds really fascinating. So Dr. Carlsson is an architect, historian and lecturer at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. She’s specialised in the history of technology,
Landscape and urban planning in 20th century Britain, and is published widely on the intersection of the history of computing, landscape and planning. Before coming to Edinburgh, she completed her PhD in architecture at MIT and taught architecture studios and seminars at the Bartlett, the AA here close by, Boston Architectural College
And worked professionally in architecture, landscape architecture in London, New York and Vienna. And finally, I’d like to mention that she’s also currently part of a project at the Canadian Centre for Architecture titled “The Digital Now” in which she looks at the gendered histories of planning in 1950s and ’60s Britain,
Moa’s lecture will be followed by a short response from Otto Saumarez Smith. He’s currently an Assistant Professor in Architectural History at the University of Warwick. He also chairs the 20th Century Society’s Casework Committee. He’s written widely about modern architecture and cities, particularly in post-war Britain and quite recently was the recipient
Of a mid-career fellowship here at the Paul Mellon Centre. His latest book is “Boom Cities: Architects, Planners and The Politics of Radical Redevelopment in 1960s Britain”, which explored the transformation of city centres across Britain in the 1960s. Moa, the floor is yours. – Thank you. Oops, so thank you so much for coming, everyone that’s in the room and also those who are online on Zoom. And before I start, I just want to thank Rixt and Sria for inviting me to present and also Ella, Kathleen, Tim and others at the Paul Mellon Centre for making this possible.
And I have been really looking forward to presenting this paper here in this audience and I’m really grateful to Otto for taking on the role as kind of discussant or kind of chair of this session, I suppose. So in this presentation, I will be talking about links between coal mining
And urban development in 1950s Britain. And a lot has been written about the coal industry in Britain, we know that. About collieries, about mining communities, about how coal transformed our cities, the national economy and every day life in different ways. And most of these accounts really foreground coal
As this powerful and incredibly useful resource. And they demonstrate how critical it was to the development of the modern state and to modern life. And some of the recent accounts that we might think of would be work such as Gary Boyd’s recent “Architecture and the Face of Coal”,
Which came out only last year. There’s also work being done at the University of Chicago by someone like Aleksandr Bierig who is working on a history of the London Coal Exchange. And up in the Scottish context where I’m based, we have Ewan Gibbs who recently published a book called “Coal Country: The Meaning
And Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland”. And there’s a lot more scholarship that we can point to, such as the five volume “The History of the British Coal Industry” that was published in the first half of the 1990s. And on the question of kind of coal or maybe more derelict land more generally,
We have the powerful polemic “Derelict Britain” published by John Barr in 1969. But the way I see it, there’s a certain kind of untold history of coal that hasn’t really been fully researched yet. And it doesn’t concern really the impact of using coal as fuel, but rather the urban consequences
Of the huge amount of waste that was generated in the process of extracting coal from the ground. The way that this waste was handled and disposed of it links in to urban developments in really interesting and peculiar ways, the way I see it and to my knowledge at least,
Haven’t really been fully appreciated yet. So as Rixt mentioned what I’m gonna share here today is part of my book project that I’m just working to complete which is titled “Scenic Calculations”. And in this book I really trace how the national landscape here and across Great Britain,
But also the perceptions and the understanding and feelings about that landscape changed and were transformed with the expansion of the coal, electricity and oil industries. And in my book I analyse a number of kind of significant industrial schemes all the way from Dungeness, up to Orkney and Shetland.
And in these accounts I trace the important role of landscape architects but also, as Rixt mentioned, of these statistical and later computerised and mathematical methods of planning in that process. So one of the chapters in my book is about the Welsh Village of Aberfan and it traces what happened to that village
And to the entire kind of valley around it after that tragic disaster in October of 1966. And this, as most of you probably know or perhaps remember, was when a spoil heap that was located on the slope just above the village slipped and came down on the village
And I will say more about that later on. But before we get to that, what do we mean when we say coal spoil or colliery waste? Coal spoil is essentially the debris. The debris, so the waste material that is removed when you mine coal and it’s material that doesn’t have enough coal content
For commercial processing. So it’s really a mix of different kinds of material. How much such waste was there? What is this, the kind of the quantities of this substance that I’m talking about? Between 1913 and 1983, according to the records of the National Coal Board, more than 14 billion metric tonnes of coal
Were mined in the United Kingdom. And it’s worth remembering that for every tonne of matter that was brought to the surface, about a third of that was this waste that had to be disposed of somehow. So in my project, and in what I’m going to present here tonight, I’m really addressing what happened
To that more than 6.5 billion tonnes of colliery waste that was generated during that period. Where did it end up? And here we can see a list of some of the spoil heaps that were recorded by the Coal Board in 1955. But we know, subsequently, that there was a lot more than these.
The colliery spoil really generated a particular kind of dereliction, one might say, but it also did a lot more than that and that’s some of the things that I will talk about here. But in summary, we can say that the National Coal Board deployed three kind of general strategies
For disposing of this waste material. And each of these strategies had pretty significant consequences for how postwar Britain developed in particular places and areas. And I call these strategies lost, stashed and piled and I will present them in that order, although they fully kind of overlap during the period that I’m talking about.
I’ll go through the first two a bit more quickly and then discuss the last one, the piles, in a bit more detail. So first, colliery spoil was lost which meant that it was done away with quite literally and here’s one example of that. In County Durham, coal spoil from collieries
That were la located on the coast was dumped straight into the sea using these aerial ropeways. And starting already in the 19th century, just under 3 million tonnes of such waste was dumped onto the beaches every year. And when coming in from a certain direction,
The waves and the wind would push the coal, which some of it would sort of float on the surface, back onto the beaches turning them completely black and this would result often. There are many kind of firsthand accounts, recollections of this in a layer
Maybe three or four foot thick of this black waste material along this coastline. And in places where the stuff kind of piled up, there would be deposits as thick as 30 feet along the County Durham coastline. But coal being a valuable kind of substance, this buildup of the kind of sea coal
Led to a sub-industry among people that gathered and collected coal along these beaches. And this has been really beautifully documented by documentary photographers such as Chris Killip. You can see a picture of his book there on the right and also by someone like Mark Pinder. This is a picture from Easington Beach,
Which I will come back to later. And I should say also that this stretch of coastline was eventually cleaned up with a project, Neptune Project of the National Trust. But the concept of lost, colliery spoil being lost, typically meant something else. It meant that you essentially spread it out
To be absorbed in agricultural areas. First, you would remove the top layer of soil, the top soil, you would scrape that off, then you would spread out the coal spoil across the fields, across the areas, and finally you would reapply and spread out the top soil again on top of the spoil.
And this typically provided sufficient kind of ground or ground kind of soil substrate to plant grass. And this would then result in areas that could be used for grazing animals and pasture. But there was a kind of growing critique of these projects because it created grazing at quite a high cost
And was really worth kind of spending that money on land that would essentially just be used in this way. The second strategy used by the National Coal Board to dispose of colliery waste was stashing it away in large infrastructural project. As Britain entered the 1960s, a situation had developed where large urban
And infrastructural projects were initiated that required a huge amount of fill material. And these would be things like motorways, New Towns and other large building projects. We can think of bridges, for example. In 1968, for example, the Ministry of Transport contracts required 14 and a half million tonnes of fill materials.
So there was really a huge demand for this kind of fill. So it really seemed to many like a match made in heaven, especially as using up the coal spoil would help the project of doing away with derelict or scarred land. So first we have the motorways. The Preston Bypass was opened
By Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in December 1958. Because the subsoil of this area was generally kind of weak, it was a weak clay, a subbase along the whole path was laid down and the chosen material for this subbase was colliery waste. And the subbase had a thickness of around 16 or so inches
And it was laid down along the full stretch of the route. So a total of just under 300,000 tonnes of waste was stashed away under this particular motorway. And then around 1961, so three or so years later, in preparation for the construction of the M4,
Which runs from West London to the Southwest of Wales, the Department of Environment sought to actually establish sites for tipping colliery spoil near the proposed route of the new motorway. So essentially thinking ahead, bringing the colliery waste where it would later be needed. And here we have situations where the local landowners
Took advantage of this situation, some of them earning up to 5,000 pounds per acre to make the land available for tipping. But there were, of course, important risks with using this colliery waste material. Because it contained a certain percentage of coal, there was a risk of spontaneous combustion of the unburned
Or partly burned waste. And once the colliery spoil heap or deposit started to burn, it was almost impossible to put it out and it could go on burning for up to three or four decades. And in addition to that there was also a great variability, of course, within the material
In terms of what its constituent materials were between different parts of a heap and between different heaps. And that of course, made the mechanical properties vary significantly across different heaps. And both of these problem led to kind of subsidence problems in the motorways that later had to be dealt with.
In 1966, a few years later, a stretch of the M62 motorway which runs across the West Riding just south of Leeds, here a list and a map was drawn up of the collieries near to the proposed route from where such spoiled waste material could be fetched.
And here the material was mostly used in embankments, which were needed across this predominantly flat Yorkshire landscape. So there was quite a lot of collieries and heaps to choose from. And the council, the local council, was of course fully on board with this strategy. Partly, because it would ease the amount
Of rehabilitation works needed for these derelict tips. It would help them do away with the dereliction. The West Riding County Council even offered to pay the contractor for the difference between using the colliery waste versus buying in the bulk filling from other sources. And this question of joint contracts,
So between sourcing road fill and between reclamation, reclaiming kind of spoil heaps was considered by the Northwest Road Construction Unit of the Ministry of Transport, specifically in the Lancashire region. In 1971, three-quarters of a million tonnes of colliery waste from NCB owned tips was used as fill for the Lancashire-Yorkshire M62 motorway.
This was the first time that colliery waste was actively encouraged in the tender documents. A move that was of course welcomed by the NCB and its Chairman Derek Ezra, who had put a high premium on the product once he realised it was something that one could sell. So just some statistics.
In 1967, the National Coal Board sold around 7 million tonnes of colliery waste, primarily for road construction. So quite a significant sum. 200,000 tonnes were also sold for brick making, particularly in Scotland and South Wales and around 60,000 tonnes were sold to cement manufacture. So these are some additional ways
That this kind of spoil waste material found its way into our built environment. But in many cases, what limited the use of colliery spoil was the cost of transporting it, after all, it was a very heavy product. And in the end it was up to the contractors
To decide what fill material they wanted to use and pay for. Another option discussed was to, actually, align the motorway routes so as to bring them closer to the areas where fill was most abundant. But this was quickly dismissed by the Department of the Environment because clearing dereliction wasn’t their top priority.
Colliery waste was also used as hardcore in building construction. From the 1950s it was used extensively in urban developments near these coal fields where there was a surplus of this kind of waste or fill material. And we know that spoil from collieries and waste heaps, slag heaps,
Was included in the constructions of hundreds and thousands of domestic properties in Britain between 1945 and 1970, particularly as support under concrete floors. And some of the examples that I’ve looked at are in Gateshead you can see here, Ashton which is near Wigan, near the Wigan Alps
And also Peterlee, a New Town in County Durham which is really just a few hundred yards from the Easington Beach. And I’m gonna show you quickly a video of the Peterlee New Town. So we can think about where that coal waste kind of ended up. – It all began in 1882- – Oops. – [Narrator] When the ladies wore bustles and things were- – [Moa] That’s the wrong place. Excuse me. Here we go. That better. – [Narrator] This is Peterlee, a New Town in County Durham. A large proportion of its population are miners. The Master of Painting at Durham University was appointed to collaborate with two architects of the corporation staff. Together, they have produced homes of the future. The old mining villages of the area are still there.
And at first there was opposition to the new project, but now the slogans are wearing off the walls. And men like Mr. Bell, a banksman at Horden Colliery, wish they’d been able to move there long ago. He has his name down for a house. His son Alan already lives in the New Town. His two-story house is up to date and labour saving. Like his father, he enjoys gardening. He’s a deputy also at Horden Colliery. Mother-in-law, Mrs. Charlton, finds the kitchen just what she always wanted. When Peterlee was started in 1948, its general design was uninspired. It was just another New Town. Seven years later, plans were altered and the change began in the Southwest area where the Bells now live. There’s accommodation in Peterlee for the older people.
Mr. Walker there spent 51 years in mining. And for the younger generation, Easington Technical College is being built in Peterlee, Yes, with its open-effect modern housing and ideal position with sea on one side and pleasant country on the other, Peterlee points the way to future living conditions in the the mining areas. – But before long, a whole new problem emerged with these newer homes built with the use of colliery spoil, sulphate attack on concrete. Sulphate attack on concrete ground floor slabs turned out to be a really, really serious problem. Once the sulphates, which are in the colliery waste,
Come in contact with the concrete a reaction starts and this produces crystals which forces the concrete to kind of expand and heave and this causes crack in the concrete slab. The slab also starts to disintegrate, weakening it and reducing its ability to support the built structure. And the areas where the developments
Have suffered most badly from these kinds of problems are, of course, the developments where the waste was most plentiful. So there’s a direct kind of correlation there between these different histories. In the 1960s we start using a damp proofing membrane which, for the architects, is essentially that plastic sheet
That you put under the concrete to separate the fill from the slab. But probably the most kind of well-known strategy for disposing of this waste product used by the National Coal Board was to dump it in areas were it was as easy for them to access
And cost effective for them to use as possible. And this resulted in this huge conical heaps, sometimes reaching a height of over 45 metres, stretching out across along roads and other areas for several miles sometimes. And here we can see a picture of these like slag spoil heaps
Near Wigan, colloquially called the Black Alps or the Wigan Alps. And I’m gonna show you another film and I think we can have a whole conversation possibly about just these films which are kind of amazing in their own way, I think. So as these spoil piles, these spoil heaps, grew larger and larger,
Life of course continued among them and next to them. Here is a film produced by the National Coal Board Film Unit demonstrating the allegedly happy community in Flimby, Cambria who have gathered for a rugby game in the shadow of this enormous spoil heap. And this is a film from 1948
And the Coal Board generated quite a number of these films. The one from Peterlee was another example to kind of demonstrate that their activities really weren’t that detrimental. Just kind of some amazing imagery there. It’s important also to note that these spoil heaps,
Even the very largest ones such as the one we can see here, very rarely came under planning control which of course would’ve meant that there would’ve been proper restorations condition imposed on them in terms of what would happen to them. So instead of treating them as land they were treated as chattels,
A term that means a tangible personal property that is movable between locations. So indicating essentially that they weren’t permanent, they were just used or landed temporarily in their locations. So even in situations and contacts with these spoil heaps stretched out for miles across the landscape, until the Aberfan disaster
There was no real kind of planning control as to where they would go, where they would grow in the landscape. But already in the 1940s and ’50s, there was a growing concern about the ruinous effect of these spoil heaps on rural Britain which conservationists and others saw as gobbling up Britain’s valuable countryside.
The exception of course was the architectural critic, Ian Nairn, who thought these spoil heaps were absolute marvels and they must be protected and cherished. The response to these kinds of critiques and these kind of concern was largely at first to improve the appearance of the heaps by planting and afforestation.
And there was a large research project started at the University of York, for example, which looked into how to best establish young saplings onto the spoil heaps. One idea behind that project was to, essentially, make the area occupied by the spoil heaps into real estate that would benefit the Forestry Commission.
Perhaps they could grow pines and spruce on the heaps for kind of benefit, commercial gain. But we know of course that these different strategies, so stashing the spoil away in infrastructural project or planting them and improving the appearance of these heaps were not always so clean cut. In West Riding, for example,
The appearance of the spoil heaps were improved simply because they were in view from the new motorways being built under which the coal spoil was stashed. So in 1957 when the National Coal Board was actively developing this new market for their waste product, the community in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales
Protested against the National Coal Board who had started to sell off material from the slag heap on their doorstep. They were selling it again for road ballast. This particular heap had been planted with trees already in the middle of the 19th century by coal mine owner Richard Fothergill.
And he was planting the heaps because it had suddenly become visible from his private deer park which was just located nearby. In 1957 when this kind of protest when the NCB started selling off the coal slag, the elm trees, sycamore and the silver birches were more than 100 years old,
They were between 50 and 70 metres tall. So removing the spoil material essentially led to the demolition of this kind of treasured landscape that had grown up on top of them. So there are lots of interesting kind of strands, I think, colliding in these projects. On the right-hand side,
We see a coal heap near Wrexham in North Wales where the colliery had closed in 1986. Just after the miner strike, led to the loss of 300 jobs, miner jobs. In 2008 the Cadw, so the Historic Environment Service for the Scottish government opposed a proposal
To remove this heap arguing that removing this tip would have an adverse impact on the historic landscape, not just of the area, but of Wales more generally. So again, it sort of had become part of the industrial heritage of Wales, they argued. Local resident Vera Davies
Who lives close to this tip was outraged and she responded in the newspaper. “How can that heap of rubbish be seen as a site of historical interest? I understand that coal mining is important in Wale’s history, but keeping a slag heap is just ridiculous. Whatever will they think to do next?”
And ultimately, again, because of the financial gains of selling off the material, the removal of this heap was granted in 2010 by an appeal by the Welsh government. But more generally, we can see that the attitude and the acceptance of these spoil heaps changed dramatically after the disaster
At the Merthyr Vale Colliery near Aberfan. So let’s look in a bit more detail into what happened there. And again, this is an episode that I go into in more detail in my book. So let’s look at the third video quickly. Hmm, let’s see.
So in this video, which is also from the 1940s, you will shortly see the aerial ropeway that brings colliery waste from the colliery which is located down in the Village of Aberfan up to the spoil heaps above on the hill side. And it’s quite an operation and it’s quite a tall structure.
And there was a complaint at some point that children were riding on these ropeways and that the NCB had to kind of secure it better in terms of that access. But what we can see in this video is this kind of technology of creating these spoil heaps.
And if you’re familiar with the area, you’ll recognise the profiles of the tips. So essentially cart by cart, this material is just dumped onto the heaps in this way. And tracing the growth of these spoil heaps over time is something that we can also do in aerial photographs,
As Rixt mentioned in her introduction. And this is something that I’ve also grown kind of increasingly interested in how we can use these extensive aerial photography records for urban history and rural history research. So here, for example, we can see a sequence of images
From 1945 until 1963 of this particular set of spoil heaps, how they grew and how also what we can see it’s not quite in view on this particular sortie, but we can see how also the town grew alongside of the tips and how they both developed in tandem.
So back to that morning of October 26, 1966, at 9:15 in the morning spoil heap number seven, which was located in the middle of the spoil heaps, gave way and started to slide down towards the village that was located about 150 metres below.
As it went, it hit a school and a number of farmhouses and other buildings resulting in the death of 144 people and most of those who died in this tragic accident were children, were the children of the miners who worked at the colliery that produced these tips.
And I think you can’t really mention this history without referring to that wonderful book, “Aberfan: Government and Disaster” by Ian McLean and Martin Johnes. It’s a really great, wonderful read, if you haven’t read it before. It was published in 2000 by the Welsh Academic Press. And I would say it’s really
The kind of authoritative account of what happened in Aberfan. But here we can see some more kind of powerful images of the aftermath of this disaster. So the reason for the slip was that the spoil heaps were located above a spring. There was a spring coming down the mountainside
Underneath where the spoil heaps were building up. And this eventually liquified the spoil heap to the degree that it started to move and this is what caused the slip. And of course, there was a very substantial and lengthy inquiry after this accident. And the National Coal Board argued
That they had no idea about this spring, they didn’t know it was there. But of course, everyone in the village knew that it was there and it’s also clearly visible on the OS maps of the area. For hundreds of years it had been there. But anyway, six or so months after the disaster
The National Coal Board employed landscape architect Clifford Tandy and his newly formed firm, the Land Use Consultants, to relandscape the area after the disaster. Something had to be done of course to the landscape after the Coal Board had made the remaining tips safe again.
So Clifford Tandy started to develop a number of proposals. The first idea was to simply spread out this coal spoil that remained in the village across the landscape and then dress that with some top soil and to grass it over. The idea was also to shave off
The tips of the remaining spoil heaps. So we can see that on the images on the left-hand side here, basically, changing the profile of the tips. But at this time a very heated debate had broken out about who should pay for this work, this remediation work, and the removal of the waste.
And this is the process, the kind of the political debates around this question of cost that’s really well discussed in the book I just mentioned. Leaving the spoil in the village and spreading it out was simply not an option and there was such a strong opposition to that from the local interest group.
And therefore, Tandy went back to the drawing board and drew up a new set of schemes. They were exploring transporting the spoil away either by road and using lorries or by rail to other locations. But both of these options were seen as too expensive, especially, as the National Coal Board
Had refused to pay for this operation. So in the end, they settled for a scheme that involved moving the spoil to a position out of sight from the village. Essentially, shifting it up to a plateau that was located higher up in the hills.
So here we can see some images of the final scheme that they kind of decided on and they built a conveyor belt and it took more than three years to shift the 3.5 million tonnes of waste that had come down into the village up again onto the mountain
And then terrace it this way that Tandy had planned using his drawings and models. So with this project the Land Use Consultants, and especially Clifford Tandy as the lead architect, had really proved their kind of competence in planning and landscaping with the Aberfan remediation project. So the National Coal Board kept employing them
To work in other areas where derelict land needed to be treated. And for Tandy this colliery waste provided a unique opportunity for landscape design on an enormous scale. And as you can see here, he started developing these different techniques and really studying how earth moving equipment
And bulldozers, et cetera, could be used to kind of shape and create with this waste material. And there was a certain kind of resonance at this time with the earlier period of the 18th century, the landscape gardens, and work of someone like Capability Brown who created these kind of views across the landscape,
Created new lakes and land forms, et cetera. But simultaneously and especially after the disaster of 1966, the Department of Environment started to release a growing fund for remediating derelict land. And there was a general trend after Aberfan that spoil was not really seen any longer
As an inevitable part of living in a mining area. People were demanding change and improvement of those areas. And this led to a large number of remediation schemes, which eventually turned many of these kind of derelict areas into recreational ones. So in 1973 for example,
The Derelict Land Unit that had been set up in Wales recorded 1,731 different schemes of landscape remediation around derelict coal landscapes. And just a few years earlier before Aberfan, I think they just processed like 17 projects that year. So it was an enormous growth in these kinds of projects.
So Clifford Tandy moved on and the Land Use Consultants became increasingly busy with this type of work. And one of the most extensive schemes that was undertaken was that in Stoke-On-Trent, which is another project that I discuss in the book. And Otto has also done some really interesting work on Stoke
And I know that this will be published also very soon, so we should all read that too. In Lancashire, which was home to one of the most prolific coal feeds in England that was dipped into by more than a thousand collieries, the Wigan Alps also met such a remediation fate in the mid-1960s.
Then the area was transformed into what’s now the Three Sisters Recreational Area, including what is now the Three Sisters racing track, which you can see on the left-hand side here. The picture on the right is not actually a spoil heap, but it’s such a lovely picture
Kind of one of these remediation schemes from Beckton, this dry ski slope that was created there. But the vast majority of Britain’s tips, with the exception of course some greening and kind of growth that’s happened on them, they remain largely as they were when spoil tipping ceased.
And I will end by just bringing us back to the present day and the situation that we’re in currently and how these histories may in some ways relate to that. Due to climate change, many historic deposits, especially those in South Wales, are now posing growing and significant threats to their local communities.
Increase in rainfall, for example, increases the risk of landslides of spoil tips that are located on sloping ground, which is exactly what happened in Aberfan. In February 2020, so only a few years ago, as such a land slip occurred in Tylorstown as the area was hit by three storms in a quick succession.
Storm Dennis hit and caused 60,000 tonnes of coal spoil to slip down the hillside covering a cycle path and it also blocked the river valley with several metres of thick colliery spoil. And this triggered the UK Coal Authority to undertake an emergency review of all the spoil tips in Wales
And it turned out that it’s more than 2,500 of them. When the National Coal Board was privatised and became British Coal in 1987, as a result, most of the old spoil tips throughout Britain ended up either in local authority or private ownership. And today the tip safety, for example here in Wales,
Is a devolved issue that has fallen to Wales to deal with and then, as a consequence, also to pay for. And kind of the laws that relate to these spoil tips and how they’re maintained and monitored is still the Mines and Quarries Act of 1969,
So the Act that was developed after the Aberfan disaster. And while this Act of course made an enormous difference to how these landscapes are maintained, it still lacks a kind of holistic or comprehensive programme for how to deal and maintain these heaps and it lacks power.
It doesn’t give authorities any power to intervene, except in the circumstance where there’s been an accident or an emergency. So kind of just you respond as it’s happening, as opposed to before I guess. But the survey that was started in 2020, first of all, involved establishing the ownerships of these heaps.
There’s, I said, more than 2,500 of them but it wasn’t clear exactly who owned them because the National Coal Board had really not kept an extensive or comprehensive record of where this waste had been dumped. Most of it is on private land with around 40% of them in public ownership.
And of these 2,500 tips, about 295 are since 2021 categorised as high risk, which means that they might endanger a life or property. 72 spoil heaps in South Wales are further located on sloping ground just above villages or towns. Some of the tips have weather stations or monitoring boreholes
With the really ones with the highest risk and the highest risk ones have been installed with monitors, movement sensors that can be remotely monitored. And if a substantial or sufficient movement is detected within any of these heaps, this will now trigger an alarm system which could lead to
Things like evacuating the villages, et cetera. So the situation I think is really quite serious and it relates to these histories I think directly in really interesting and political ways. So just to conclude, I think I probably run over. But I mean this project, I’m really hoping to chart
The history of this abundant resource and its effect on the urban geography of Britain. I will explore, and my project explores, how different policies and departments of the British state collaborated and negotiated and attempted to create mutual benefits from this quite dire situation. And I think focusing on these colliery spoil heaps
And the coal waste more generally can also provide a sort of new lens, I think, to view these urban large-scale projects in a new light. And I’m hoping that by doing so, we can also start to link environmental history and urban history, perhaps architectural history also, closer together.
So thank you so much for coming to listen. – Oh, I get a kick out of that. That was marvellous. Thank you, Moa. Absolutely wonderful paper. I want to talk about when I first became involved with these sort of issues or sort of aware of them, and I was visiting Ironbridge in Shropshire somewhere where you wouldn’t,
You know it’s not a 20th century place. You go there it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site. You go to see the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. And I don’t know if anybody else, I found it very strange that you find these sites in a landscape which is so green and beautiful.
There isn’t a hint of the satanic there. It’s very green and I puzzled about this. It’s a very odd place walking about. And I came across, I saw something called the Silkin Way, and I suddenly realised I should’ve known this before being a historian of postwar Britain,
But I realised because of that name that I was in a New Town and the reason that I was in this landscape that was so green was because this was also the landscape of Telford New Town. And now Telford New Town was one of a number of places,
You know the history of the New Towns is told through dispersal. But they were often used as a Peterlee in places as a response to issues of dereliction and the issue there in Telford was really quite extreme. They had something called the measles map which showed, and it was extremely dangerous.
I stayed in a hotel and the person told me about they were digging in their garden and suddenly the spade fell through because they hadn’t worked out where these mines were and the slag heaps were still there, still burning. And so the first thing that they had to do, the development corporation,
Was just work out where all of this was. And there were huge worries about children, this line that came out in Moa’s of playing on the slag heaps and it is a very bad thing. And you know so this landscape that when I visited Ironbridge was green and pastoral,
You know in the 1950s was really seen as a place that was luna and revolting and scary and frightening. So I’ve got two points to make about Telford, I suppose. And one is the invisibility of this history. That it’s not talked about. And I might turn that into a question about heritage
And how we deal with these spaces. I mean I think there’s an irony in somewhere like Ironbridge, which has made a tourist attraction of this 19th century history, that the 20th century history has disappeared. I think of the recent demolition lamented by me and maybe a few other people
Of the beautiful Ironbridge B Power Station with its wonderful ochre colour to be like the sort of iron, the ferrous soil around there. So that’s my first thing. And the second one I want to is just Telford New Town. they planted 5 million trees in this place.
You know it was quite an extraordinary thing. But this resulted in the landscape because a lot of it remains dangerous and I don’t drive, it’s not a place for a pedestrian. But you sort of suddenly come across these strange hills and until I understood some of this history,
It didn’t make sense why there’s, you know you get a little piece of these things and it’s exceptionally undense. It makes earlier New Towns like Harlow or Stevenage look like Rome or Paris. You know this is a very discombobulating place. But also, I think this is a thing
In Telford to talk about some of the successes of this. And you know Telford remains one of the highest growing places, as a lot of the Mark III New Towns. And that’s a theme of optimism that I want to sort of keep. And when I’ve been working the other way
I came to this subject was at the end of work I’ve done on the British Leisure Centre a thing I’m sort of one of the defenders of. You know that a lot of that, people like Cliff Tandy and the landscape architects who are thinking about issues of derelict land have this huge,
Which I find very inspiring, optimism when they talk about it. One of the things that this is going to, you know that Michael Dower talks about, there’s going to be this new age of leisure and derelict land is one of the places
That they’re going to be able to come into a new economy. I like very much Sylvia Crowe’s argument, the recently discovered then, idea that the Norfolk Broads, this landscape at the centre of people’s recreation and was actually the results of mediaeval peat building, peat mining. So you know that actually the Norfolk Broads
Was a mining landscape showed that with a bit of help and you know you’ve got these huge batteries and machinery that you can use, that you could speed this up and you could shift these places and the landscapes of crisis into landscapes of sort of hope and possibility.
And now I suppose that optimism, one of the reasons I’ve been interested in this and the time scale that Moa’s stuff has and the metanarratives we say about the 1970s as a time of crisis. And I’d like to sort of push her to sort of place this within that story.
And I suppose there are two ways that one could pitch this as an important discussion. And one of them is that these are, you’re fighting for the periphery. These are forgotten places. This is a new history of, to use multiple cliches, of left behind Britain or so on.
But I’m wondering whether we can actually push this further to the centre of historiographical metanarratives and how this might fit in with, A, a sort of a dynamic welfare states from the 1970s, someone like Karl Clamers’ arguments or the metanarrative of deindustrialization. So in my comments,
Those are the two things that I want to sort of, I want to discuss. And one last point, I don’t how long I’ve gone on for, but if I can make one more point. I was thinking in this about the rapid changes, you know trying to link energy production with landscape
And how our places look and you end by, so that there are new environmental concerns which are going to profoundly change how cities look. And I just suddenly was thinking that I didn’t know about this stage in between actually of that of Britain becoming that importer of coal and where that,
Does the spoil stay at source? Where is it coming through? And I wondered if you knew about that. So those are my three questions and what a great paper. My piece is coming out and it was about leisure in the Journal of British Studies. But they’re hopeless, so don’t submit there. They’ve been done for a while. But thank you. And, Moa. – Thank you so much, Otto, and it’s really great to have your comments and kind of to think along with me and with all of us about these kind of histories. And I think it does raise a lot of questions, I mean this kind of material
Can go in so many different directions, obviously. And you started with talking about the, I don’t know places like Peterlee really kind of coming about as a response to that dereliction that, that particular area was facing. But then you also were talking about this kind of the invisibility
Or the kind of one might sometimes say that these kinds of projects kind of sometimes, but not in all places, but it sort of erases something and it naturalises something. And there are many people that have kind of written about this, but I think it’s really important to remember
That some of the early landscapes and landscape architects, you mentioned Sylvia Crowe for example. I mean the idea for example, Sylvia Crowe did a landscape around the nuclear power station in Wales in Snowdonia National Park, which I happen to also write about in my book. But that’s a really interesting one
Because the National Parks policy has just been minted and then a few years later the civil nuclear programme gets started and these two policies come in direct conflict with one another in this national park. And Sylvia Crowe gets hired to kind of help deal with that situation
And she doesn’t try to naturalise the scheme. Like the point isn’t to make them blend in and you know hide them or whatever. The point is to really use that opportunity to create a new kind of landscape that we hadn’t had before. And she refers to it as a kind of cosmic landscape
In her book “Landscape of Power”. And I think that’s, I think, the response to your question. I don’t know what you think about that. But it was really an attempt to create something different and yeah, don’t know. I think the way that these things have…
I mean a lot of the landscapes that they created have become very naturalised to the degree that we sometimes try to protect them and designate them, for example. And it’s difficult because people don’t even know that they’re there or that they were designed really carefully at some point. Is that? (chuckles)
– She’s such a hero, Sylvia Crowe, and that book is absolutely, it’s so lyrical and wonderful about the sort of possibilities of that. – Yeah, yeah, she really is. And someone like Luca Csepely-Knorr who is at Liverpool University is working a lot on the history of Crowe, but also someone like Brenda Colvin
Who you’re probably familiar with also and really kind of bringing the women’s contribution to these histories to the fore and acknowledging them. There’s a bigger question around how this fits into the kind of the wider narratives of the welfare state. And that’s something that I also try to think about in my book.
Of course, I mean it’s something that we all should think about working in this period. And one of the reasons that I’m really interested in these planning histories, and it does go into a lot of areas you know social and political history that’s outside of I think my realm
As a urban historian you know you quickly get it. For example, the Aberfan disaster is so rich and well researched and there’s been so much written on that already. But the way I see it, these kind of architects and planners that were working on these projects,
They basically tried to change, not just the landscape, but also the profession in which they operated in. The Land Use Consultants came in, started in 1966 or was it ’65? (chuckles) Otto will correct me. And it was really a new kind of design and planning and engineering practise that could deal with
These kinds of landscapes at that time. And I find that really interesting in itself was that these kind of environments really called for and needed and required a new kind of design and planning practitioner that could handle the complexity of this project. I don’t know if you have anything.
You worked also on the Land Use Consultants. – A bit, yes. I suddenly wanted to ask about the politics of the Coal Board. I mean who are they and what do they think? What is their responsibility, ideas of moral economy to, I mean who are their constituents? Are they the miner?
Or are they the larger and what are their politics? Are they technocrats or big union men or who are they? – And again, there might be someone in the room that’s- – [Audience Member] Well- – Yes, here we go. – [Audience Member] Yes well, I used to work for the National Coal Board, ’78 to ’83, I think ’82. So the National Coal Board, just to answer,
I mean it’s astonishing that I’m of an age where I can say this, but that they’re a nationalised industry. But back in the ’60s, I mean people, the miners, you know the social context is worth thinking about. The miners I mean in ’46 when everything was nationalised,
They thought it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Absolutely wonderful. They didn’t have to fight for their jobs, fight for getting a sack whenever there was a downturn and the mine owners used to just close the mine, a huge problem. So it was fantastic in the ’40s and ’50s for the miners.
Aberfan was a huge turning point. So I’m so pleased you’ve highlighted ’cause it’s so important. It was a huge shock for the National Coal Board, because I’m sure you’ve realise this and you don’t have time to go into it, but they were responsible and they had all the information available to them
And there’d been earlier slips in South Wales. Particularly problematic, because of the nature of the valleys. But thank you so much for bringing all the memories back for me, actually, ’cause it was a long time ago for me. But it’s very interesting to see how this social side has developed.
And the other thing I’d like to say, as well that struck me, was it’s very interesting that you’ve highlighted the coal industry, but of course the mineral industry in the UK has carried on and it’s interesting to see how the UK deals with mining or mineral extraction today
And has developed since the ’40s and ’50s. So now when you get a planning consent for a quarry, the restoration is all sorted. There’s SSSIs galore. You know they don’t even like restoration to agriculture anymore, they want something really special. So things have moved on
And Aberfan I think has a big part to play in that. Anyway, thank you. – Thank you so much for sharing and for coming. That’s brilliant. Yeah, I mean kind of the beast of the National Coal Board, of course, also changes with changes in government.
And I mean a lot, again, has been written for example, about when Thatcher comes in and the miner strike and the kind of slow or fast demise of the coal industry. But again, I think these planners and landscape architects that I’m focusing on, they sit in that really unique situation
Between a very large powerful national agency that is increasingly forced to kind of take responsibility because of the various acts, planning acts, et cetera, that are being passed. So I think pressure on them to deal with questions of aesthetics of the landscape, dereliction, et cetera, it’s also kind of coming
From above in a way from these planning instruments. So that’s something I’m really interested in because very often, if you go to Kew in other places you see that they really often do the bare minimum and they often do kind of the number crunching to figure out what they’re going to do exactly.
But not always. I mean there’s also schemes where they really cared about the landscape and about their role in these various communities, et cetera. And they had been active, of course, for a very long time in certain places. I don’t think we can kind of generalise across that responsibility.
But the planners, they sit and they’re hired by these really large industrialists at the time where there’s growing public discontent about the changing landscape and what the industrial projects in these various industries are creating across Great Britain. And they become kind of mediators between,
I think, public interests and the interest of the state. And that they of course, for example, Clifford Tandy, he serves the National Coal Board and there was a lot of critique against his work that he was trying to kind of greenwash and whitewash that disaster
And that it wasn’t really good design work, et cetera. But I think he did have that optimism that you mentioned also. That’s at least how I see it, that he understood that something had to be done and like someone had to do it and he went into a job like that
Trying to kind of do his best and do something new with that opportunity. Oh, sorry. – [Audience Member] Thanks, I just wanted to pick up on that point about Tandy. I’m really curious about the relationship with the picturesque that you mentioned and about the creation of a natural or natural-seeming landscape.
That’s obviously such a tense relationship with the industrial aspect here. I’m wondering whether it’s tied into the immense interest in the picturesque through the ’30s and ’40’s through the architectural view, that’s obviously a very familiar history. And whether there is something to be said here about the slightly patrician aspects of the picturesque
Seeping into a history that we otherwise see as, yeah, in the interest of the working class. And just a separate point was that your incredibly vivid and detailed historical account made me think of where I was this weekend up on the Northwest coast in Sellafield, further north at Saint Bees,
Where there were a colony of seabirds, kittiwakes and razorbills nesting on a quarried coastline. And I just think it’s another interesting example of the natural world taking over an extracted material site. – Yeah great, and thank you so much for kind of making that connection. I mean the links to the picturesque
Are really explicit in this work. And someone like Clifford Tandy, I mean he didn’t study landscape architecture for example. He came into the profession because of his active war service. He was working as a land surveyor during the war period, you know drawing up, measuring, surveying, et cetera.
And he acquired a lot of skills, terrain mapping and reconnaissance of different kinds and especially skills for kind of surveying these kind of views and vistas across the landscape using tools that have been used in the military setting for, I mean I guess millennial actually, but many centuries at least.
And when he applied to become a member of the Landscape Institute or ILA as it was called back then, because he didn’t have any qualifications, what he submitted were these analysis reports of these picturesque landscape gardens. So he went to places like Stowe, et cetera,
And kind of analysed them from using these tools that he had learned to demonstrate that he understood them and he knew how to work with them. And I think there are many examples of where they really make explicit references to that period. Other landscape architects did as well. There was someone working
For the Central Electricity Generating Board, Ronald Hebelweth, who developed also a set of tools for kind of dealing with landscapes of this enormous scale. You know power stations are visible for such a great area around them. Like how do you design such an area
And create those views coming at them from the motorway and from nearby and far away and up the hill and like down by the lake. You know there’s like so much intricacy to these projects, some of them. And he studied, I mean he studied the picturesque landscapes and the parks and the techniques
That they would have employed, someone like Capability Brown and others. And I don’t know, there are also moments where they sort of see themselves in that lineage, which is also kind of an interesting I think juxtaposition. And it does of course become political, just like the picturesque gardens were highly political.
I mean these industrial landscapes are also really political. I mean I’d love to, maybe over drinks, we can talk more about that. But I find that fascinating. – [Audience Member] Here. – [Audience Member] Thank you. Thank you so much, Moa, that was fascinating. I loved the videos, in particular.
Mine was more of a sort of perhaps like bureaucratic or institutional question. But what I was struck by looking at when the National Archives AT marking, I knew very well at the Department of the Environment. But I was wondering as an environmental historian, how do you see the establishment
Of the Department of the Environment in this story? What happens there? I mean there’s lots of talk about Aberfan as a turning point, but do you see that sort of institutional restructuring as significant, or maybe it’s not, but I was interested in that. – Yeah, that’s a really great question
And I think maybe you know more about that than I do. – Well, I mean- – The restructuring. – [Audience Member] I work on housing history, ’cause the MHLG then gets absorbed into the DOE, but this was interesting for suddenly making me step back
And think, oh, there’s a lot more that’s going on in those offices at the same time. – Yeah, definitely, in that kind of hierarchy in terms of who makes the decisions and how different questions move up and down the ranks. I mean that is, of course, super interesting.
I don’t really have anything specific to say about the Department of Environment and that formation. I mean I’d love to know more about it. It does probably come into it, but I’m not sure at this point exactly. Yeah. – [Audience Member] Thank you. – Sure. – [Audience Member] Thanks so much. Thanks for that wonderful talk and I learned a lot. I guess I was thinking this maybe goes back more to the stashed rather than piled history, but of this kind of reuse of waste as an architectural material.
And this is more a question out of ignorance than any particular aim in asking you this, which is how this fits into a history of the reuse of materials for architecture and the kind of question of the value of architectural materials. Because it seems like you’re telling this incredible history
Of the kind of devaluation and revaluation over and over and over again of the same material, right. It’s valued as something which produces value, then it’s waste and it’s valuable again somehow, but then it’s waste again. And it just made me think of how this does
Or doesn’t fit into other sort of histories of the material reuse where now its value, it has value only in this sort of particular and very specific context rather than as some kind of precious or otherwise valuable matter. – Yeah, great. I love that question.
I haven’t really thought about it as a history of reuse, but I do think that’s a really interesting kind of angle actually. And you’re right that the whole, well my kind of focus on colliery waste is really about that process of reevaluating that substance and what it means in different contexts
And to different actors, right. It doesn’t mean the same to everyone and even the same spoil heap. Of course there’s so many different viewpoints and feelings and positions about it. Yeah, I don’t really know I mean how it relates to reuse histories in the built environment. The more valuable it becomes,
I mean there’s a history of kind of financial value versus there’s something about kind of financial values versus the value of, I don’t know, the kind of emotional value of the dereliction then I think that balance is really interesting to trace. I don’t know. Do you have any thoughts, Otto,
On that to kind of reuse angle? (chuckles) He’s shaking his head. Do you have any thoughts on that yourself? – No, all I had was there was a bad pun about spolia and spoil. – Yeah, yeah, that’s true. Yeah, it’s the same kind of ruse isn’t it? – You know the kind of things that get reused and put on the exterior versus the kind of spoil or waste which then becomes a kind of substrate or ground. – Yes, and also I mean, again,
I mentioned just that they weren’t treated as land, they were treating as these mobile assets from a legal point of view and that their point was to move them. They weren’t sort of meant to stay but then there was no planning for where they would go or who would move them.
So I guess that could be another aspect of reuse possibly, yeah. But yeah, I’ll think about that. Thank you. – [Audience Member] Thank you. – [Audience Member] Hi, I just wanted to say thank you so much for a really fascinating talk and also to echo what this gentleman was saying
About the significance of this history, especially with regards to Aberfan and also thank you for bringing it into the present as well. I think it’s really important to have a space to think about how the energy industry still impacts communities so significantly and perhaps even kind of after coal in Britain,
Thinking about nuclear and other even more renewable energies and how they might impact our landscape and the communities around them. My question was about the kind of sources that you used. I mean the the Coal Board Film Unit is absolutely fascinating and I was wondering if you used any kind of oral histories
Or the kind of living memory of these landscapes as a bit of a counterpoint to that very idealised, almost propagandist vision that we have in those films. – Yeah, I mean I agree. I think the films are really interesting and that’s something I’m sort of looking into
A little bit now with this project I’m doing at the CCA in Montreal. But I mean the National Coal Board Film Unit was active for so many decades and they produced something like 1,000 films about the coal mining industry. And some of them were informational films,
But a lot of them were also kind of promotional films. So they would be shown in cinemas before like the main picture came on, like you’d have a short film about coal mining and people playing rugby in front of this spoil. I mean they hired also like the best filmmakers around,
Like some of the biggest name from that industry were active at the Coal Board. And I just find that so interesting that, that public communication work was so prioritised and it was so important to their activities, right. Even though of course they were a state organ,
In some ways, they could go about their business. But yeah, it was such a strong PR angle to their work. The second part of your question was about? – [Audience Member] About oral histories and if you- – Oral histories, yes- – Spoke to people who remembered these landscapes as they were then.
– Yes. I mean that is a really good question and I’ve tried to for my, so during my PhD you’re right, I did look mostly at the kind of the planning side of thing and the people who paid for it and the people who drew them.
And so for the book I really kind of tried to incorporate more of the kind of the reception history of these sites and how they, which is harder, a lot harder I think for all of us. Like we know how people receive this work is not as covered.
I’ve looked a lot, for example, at the British Newspaper Archive. Both for the coal industry and for the electricity industry and for the oil industry, there’s a fantastic oral history project at the British Library and that’s of course not exclusive, but it does include a lot of accounts by local residents,
As well as, the more kind of powerful actors in this story. So I’ve spent a lot of work there. It’s something that I kind of always wish I had more on. So for example, the chapter I have on the nuclear power station in Wales, that chapter’s a lot about the resistance to it
And the resistance to the nuclear power stations came from London, it didn’t come from Wales, right. In Wales they wanted the nuclear power station. They wanted it in the middle of the national park because the coal industry was like dying. The jobs had gone. The nuclear industry promised a new kind of rebirth
Of energy for Wales that they needed so desperately. And then we have people like Clough Williams-Ellis who wrote “England and the Octopus” and others who has Portmeirion just like a few 20 minutes drive from where the power station is. And he’s also the Chairman of the campaign
For the Protection of Rural England at the time and he’s very careful threading that line. He’s like sort of both a local resident, but he’s also then part of this conservation agency in London. So I don’t know, the history of that is just so fascinating
And I think having more kind of on the ground accounts always helps us to tell and understand these histories. So I think it’s a kind of constant struggle. But yeah, I’ve used a lot of newspapers. The projects are quite recent. I’ve been to Orkney. I’ve been to the oil terminal in Flotta there
And there are still people around who were, ’cause that played out in the early ’70s, so it’s a very recent history. But it’s not like a substantial part of my toolkit, I would say. But I do find it really interesting, yeah. – [Audience Member] Thank you. It’s really, really helpful. Thanks
– [Sria] I’d just like to say a huge thanks for the talk. I thought was brilliant. I have questions of my own, but I think we are running out of time. So I have a couple of questions from the audience. There’s three of them
And I think I’ll just ask them one after the other and then maybe you can answer them together. – Sure. – [Sria] So the first one is quite specific, it’s about the film about Aberfan, which included text in Spanish. Why? Was it aimed towards Latin American specialists?
Could you please name who made the film and what it was called. And the second one, you’ve talked a little bit about this already when you started but it’s around, well, Germany and others in Europe have retained the idea of landscapes of leisure. For instance, retaining redundant steelworks as parks
Instead of demolishing and treating the site as real estate. How can the UK get back to treating ex-industrial sites as new places of leisure and culture? I guess this is to both Moa and Otto. And then the last one is about dereliction. It’s asking or saying that it’s interesting
Because it’s about responsibility rather than impact. Do you see a range of terms that relate to this or is it consistent? I’m not sure if- – Say it again. – I’m not sure I fully- – Oh, yeah. – [Sria] Well, I’ll just read it out in entirety.
Can I ask about the term dereliction? I’ve been looking at it in another context and it’s interesting because it is about responsibility rather than impact. Do you see a range of terms that relate to this or is it consistent? But maybe we can go with the first two
And then if we have time to think about dereliction. – Sure, yeah, sure. And I think I’m gonna hand the second one to you, Otto. So you can think about it. Yeah, the film on Aberfan that’s also in Spanish, it’s English and Spanish. It’s there to signify that the films,
Again, you were talking about the Film Unit, there’s such an interest in these films, these promotional films and the activities. And they do get distributed abroad and that film is produced in Spanish ’cause it was distributed in Spanish-speaking contexts because there was so much interest in their output. I mean it’s super interesting.
Whoever asked that question, it’s a great question. If you send me an email I can send you the full details on that film. I can’t remember it on the top of my head. But yeah, it’s a fascinating history with those films and just thinking about how the interest was so far flung,
You know there wasn’t just kind of in the local context or across the workforce that would view these films. I mean I’ll just say something very briefly about the last question and then maybe after we can talk about the kind of current leisure spaces.
I mean the term dereliction is kind of like a buzz word, I guess in some ways at the moment. And maybe I should really, when I talk about Wales, I should really think of it as like lived dereliction. Because they’re not like forgotten landscapes somewhere else that someone has abandoned, they’re lived in.
Most of these valleys are populated and that’s what really interests me, that people live amidst the dereliction. And the dereliction, like we said before, has changed and it’s become green, et cetera. But it’s really how kind of life has transpassed amidst that dereliction that I find interesting.
Did you wanna, sorry, I’m just putting you on the spot. – Just to thank whoever online said that question about and compared to Germany and I’ve just thought about recently being in Redcar and the steelworks there and which I just think is one of the most extraordinary landscapes.
You walk along the south garden and then you see this thing on the distance and it’s like Venice with all these, from the Lagoon and it’s gone. And you know even the bit that we did manage to get listed there in that area has also been demolished
And it’s so different from that wonderful landscape in the rural which has been much more successfully and I’m very sad about it. So thank you to whoever asked that question. And I just thought that I mean about the sort of longer histories of, I found Vittoria Di Palma’s book about “Wasteland”
Really useful and I think something’s going on with that idea of dereliction, which is actually dealing with, you know we talked about the 18th century history, but there’s a religious connotation here, and the 17th century language. – Yeah, absolutely, and I think whether, I mean some of us teach in architecture schools,
Like I teach it in architecture school. And I think there’s also something in these histories for the kind of practitioner, the designer, in terms of the boldness of some of these schemes, right. They were really thinking about big, bold ideas. That I mean, yes, they weren’t immediately value engineered out,
But you know there was something about that optimism and the aspiration of some of these projects that I think we can really learn from. – [Audience Member] Can I just add something really quickly about the question about steelworks? My favourite kind of re-imagining of an abandoned steelworks
Is the Magna Centre just outside Sheffield, which is in the old Templeborough Steelworks. And I don’t know if many people have heard of it, but I spent hours there as a child in absolute wonder. I mean it’s a kind of science museum, but it’s also a terrifying chasm of darkness and fire.
To be a young child there kind of after the Industrial Era is really affecting and I really recommend it to anyone who’s interested in old steelworks and the remnants of industry. – Great, thank you. And I just wanted to say thank you everyone for coming and for your great questions
And we can continue, I guess, over a drink. – Yes, I think we need to draw to a close. Thank you so much Moa for a wonderful talk and thank you Otto for the response and for the discussion in general. Thank you everyone for being here also online.
I hope you will all come next week, as well, for David Gissen’s talk which is on “The Architecture of Disability”, which is also very exciting. And I would like to invite everyone here for a drink next door. Thank you.